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Malaria: A Scourge as Old as King Tut

In death if not in life, a bond unites King Tut, Egypt’s boy pharaoh, with the multitudes high and especially low through human history. Palace walls could not shield him from the enemy without: the anopheles mosquitoes infesting the Nile Valley with malaria parasites. A post-mortem on Tutankhamen’s mummy, scientists reported last week, shows that malaria was one of the most probable agents of his death at age 19, in the 14th century B.C.

Tut’s case may be one of the earliest established by genetic tests, but malaria was probably a common scourge then, as it still is. Last year, at least 250 million people contracted the disease, the United Nations estimates, and almost half the world’s population is at risk, mainly in poorer tropical lands. The wastingfever is expected to kill 700,000 children this year.

Malaria courses relentlessly through narratives of history and literature. It blighted the greatness that was Rome, though it may have saved the city from a sacking by Attila the Hun, who may have turned back out of fear of the fever raging there. Archaeologists digging in cemeteries near former marshes around Rome have uncovered evidence of widespread outbreaks of the disease in the empire’s waning years.

Indeed, the pestilence is so closely linked to Roman history that the word “malaria” comes from the Italian for “bad air.” The “vapors” persisted almost to the present, as Henry James knew in writing his novella “Daisy Miller.” When the guileless young American took her fateful stroll by moonlight in the Colosseum, she ignored warnings and died a few days later of “a terrible case of the fever.”

The sun never set on malaria death at British colonial outstations. If there is anything to the mummy’s curse, it may be delivered by mosquitoes. Every mile and each lock in the Panama Canal came at the expense of life to yellow fever and malaria. Marines, soldiers and Seabees returned from Pacific jungles victorious but weak with fever.

Although malaria has been largely eradicated in wealthier nations, and is easily treatable with medicines, there was a time when half of the United States was in danger. In the 19th century, “Potomac fever” was no metaphor. Europeans gave their diplomats hardship pay to induce them to serve in vaporous Washington.

Diplomats still get hardship pay in places, like those photographed here, where malaria remains endemic — where people are too poor to feed themselves, much less treat the fevers killing them.

The photographs in this slide show, courtesy of Malaria Consortium, are part of an eight-week exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan that begins March 15.

A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 2010, on page WK3 of the New York edition with the headline: Still Here: Scourge As Old as King Tut. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe